Archives

On Sunday March 20th, 2016, Ken Baumann, Lorian Long and M Kitchell gathered in secret at an undisclosed location in New Mexico. It is said they could see the vapor trails of invisible UFOs in the sky. They drew a card from a deck of ENIGMA STRATEGIES, created by The Institute for Erotic Vertigo. The prompt on their chosen card was “LITERAL SUBTERRANEAN ACTIVITIES.” The following text is a result of the days activities.

See other posts in this series from Lorian Long and Ken Baumann.

____

	[		refuse the above, only to speak for the below	]
	[	insistence upon a presence, or, perhaps, the darkness	]
	[  if everything could tunnel down, beneath, what we could do	]
	[			       could only become a secret, or	]
	[				    	       nothing at all	]

 

 

The night offers protection from the dark but below ground the form generates. Pushing into and out of earth, the snake or worm is a figure of approbation offering a route. Resisting the dirt. Pushed into cave. Cavernous activity, coyote howl into the dark. Open wound, the hole the cave the ass the gash the push the pull the in the out. If only being considered for the voice it might speak we can assume a silence that hides in S’s. This is the sincerity of the earth.

	We quote, 'the earth loves cold bodies.' Line whispered cthonically—
	language is never anything but a lie.
	                                 To crawl into the earth is a separate
        movement 	   		 than to simply close your eyes.
				
	Don't close your eyes, the dark looks much more vibrant when you pay 
        attention. Refusing the thought that to continue below will eventually
	amount to a going through voices the true meaning of night. For if all 
	that comes after is the other side, there's no reason to continue. 

	Insist not upon what comes next, but rather on 	      what hovers beyond. 

					language is never anything but a lie
					lungage as nuvur inyateng bot uh aye
					lunged martyr inverts both eyes

	'live more inside our bottoms,' says the earth,
							'live more below.'

AND SO

We built the structure beneath the house, lower than the basement. There are steps made of stone and dirt and we expect them to crumble and disperse some day. We expect all to cease to exist. Our home has become the signal of a transmission, the radio static that permeates blank air. Communication is always an excess, and one we hope to sacrifice.

The structure beneath the house, lower than the basement, was built to hold the sacred. There are herbs and stones and dirt and chalk and meteorite and a fire we refresh regularly and a pool of water and dried blood and dried come and wet blood and wet come and a neon glow that we believe we created when we stared at the spot on the wall where we thought we saw the light. The geometry of the crystal garnet echoed our declaration and this was how the world we inhabit was born. Within the sacred we push into the air and hold.

	Breath in, breath out. 

	There's an exercise to consider:

1) Build the box using dimensions you believe too small to inhabite
2) Use your eyes to look at the box
3) Push your face into dirt & whisper the secret that your body fits inside
4) Let time continue (this is an important part of the exercise)
5) One day, you will inhabit the box.

	This exercise should be carried out between the inhalation and the 
        exhalation of a breath. (Time never functioned adequately to begin 
        with, but here it is near impossible).


	Breath in, breath out.

	Another exercise:

1) Pat the earthen wall until it is flat and sturdy
2) Use the chalk to draw a door upon the wall
3) Open the door and walk through

	
	This exercise should be carried out either before breathing in
        or after breathing out, never in between. Inside the new room 
        you have entered you will see only a dimly illuminated howl of 
        wind. You are now being carried by the earth. You are like dust,
	you have gone beyond your form as human. This is not a metaphor. 

	This is a transmission delivering you from everything else.

Communication as sacrifice, speech as the sacred act. Language is as useful a tool as any, especially in considering the earth rooted in physicality instead of history. As if you could understand the route the tree’s branches follow simply by knowing when the tree was planted.

---

 

We expect our structure to begin its decline long before we are finished with it. This entropy was predetermined and built into the design. Completion depends upon a complication of finitude. We have installed a mirror so we can always understand that the wall behind us either is or isn’t there. Between what we can see and what we can’t is the center of the room. The center of the room takes on the shape of a diamond and we cover the diamond with the fluorescent glow we created by staring at the light. The shape takes up more space than would be expected, but has successfully ordered our life with its bleating repetition and rhythm, the way it pulses like we used to remember our bodies doing.

It should come as no surprise that we are neither live nor dead, but rather beneath the surface of the earth. Listen to us when we tell you that there is nothing hollow about density. The whole is fucked by the part but a cave can never talk like an asshole. Just rub dirt over everything because the stairways have become a tunnel too steep to climb back up. Fed into plastic tubing our sweat powers illumination.

We can’t help but believe the lies we understand.
We can’t help but sacrifice the meaning of our actions.
We can’t help but to encounter presence only through absence.
We can’t help but understand what it means to be below the earth forever.

On Sunday March 20th, 2016, Ken Baumann, Lorian Long and M Kitchell gathered in secret at an undisclosed location in New Mexico. It is said they could see the vapor trails of invisible UFOs in the sky. They drew a card from a deck of ENIGMA STRATEGIES, created by The Institute for Erotic Vertigo. The prompt on their chosen card was “LITERAL SUBTERRANEAN ACTIVITIES.” The following text is a result of the days activities.

See other posts in this series from Ken Baumann and M Kitchell.

____

from the burial pit a thought is pulled from its part-playing self
the dirt is neither fixed nor field
october particle, the trees decide what they mean
black bottoms will work
space, a slim portal
through which the soul will go in one language
to become another
under the dirt the sky is absent
body dissolves to rot as a thin wind lifts above the land
worms rush the stage
faith wheezes
the family robed
pale like plaster
somewhere a child is born into its colored self
mother is a word that died long ago
a high bird looks for seed
fresh embarrassment of riches
between women legs
emboldens the child, a latex mannequin
underground the night is an aluminium corpse
fossils sound
blank
black pupil copied in resin
and placed in the ashes of a former sun, inventory of destroyed works
The child is coming.

On Sunday March 20th, 2016, Ken Baumann, Lorian Long and M Kitchell gathered in secret at an undisclosed location in New Mexico. It is said they could see the vapor trails of invisible UFOs in the sky. They drew a card from a deck of ENIGMA STRATEGIES, created by The Institute for Erotic Vertigo. The prompt on their chosen card was “LITERAL SUBTERRANEAN ACTIVITIES.” The following text is a result of the days activities.

See other posts in this series from Lorian Long and M Kitchell.

____

Mycelium threading through bone. This is what she imagined as she went under. Thickening fibers of mold, spores developing with the velocity of beehives. Marrow dried to a dust that might catch in your eye if you weren’t careful. Her thoughts now——drugged——became dumb and luminous. She thought of caves set into hills like dimples. She thought of drinking alone in a city’s only tunnel. She thought that she could salvage the reputation of rats. All while the older woman’s drugs slid into her veins.
    The younger woman’s last thought——a complicated fantasy somehow compressed into the tension of a muscular twitch——had two implications: one, this thought would never be recovered, and two, this thought contained the truth of her capture.
    The younger woman, newly named Sue, fell asleep.

•

He knew that this was rare——the chance to crush a skull in the desert. A whole skull, blanched white by careless days. Its horns hooking in like pinching fingers. He looked around and saw nothing. He felt calm in a valley so drowned.
    He lifted his booted foot. The skull said nothing, and the wind seemed proud.

•

They calmed their hands over the fire. They had two hands and one mouth, but refused to claim only one body. Their mother promised them a sense of order, yet all they felt before routinely burning the stones was a depthless sense of persecution, a paranoia flickering like a star. The stones were purchased from a boy alone by the highway. They bought them to drive the boy back to his home, if he had one. The sale only encouraged him. He pushed, talked, weaving benefits with his little broken hands. They said Okay. They said I believe it. Finally, they said Stop. They boy stared at them then, or stared through them. Again alone. They pocketed the wrapped rocks and began to walk north, as the boy had instructed. That night, they unbundled the quartz and agate and slivers of obsidian, setting the bits one by one in a fire spritzed with kerosene. They fed the fire a third of the bag then waited. Thoughts turned to mother. Then mother turned to stone.

•

She knew a portion of priests who’d meet downstairs or underwater. They preferred no light. They’d revealed so much above ground, after all. At first she thought that all the priests would do is fuck, but a visiting friend had, holding her hand one night, broken it to her: they were far too bored.
    She had to know more, so she snuck a scrap of paper and needled out the nightly code. The confessing priest warned her that she wouldn’t be surprised at their activities, and that in fact their secrecy was a letdown even to themselves. She——the industrious girl——wouldn’t hear it. “I’ve got the location and I’ve got the code,” she said. “I’m going to find them.”
    This meeting was elaborate, taking place in the vicinity of a subterranean waterfall. She needed rope and lamps, talc and pitons. She spent five hours reconnoitering various perimeters. Finally, she started the descent.
    A warm light lit the dripping walls of a thin crippled cave. Moss brushed off onto her shoulders as she squeezed through. She saw bats and felt ill.
    Finally, she entered the chamber, and realized with a sigh the truth of this promised disappointment.
    The priests were all there, gathered round.
    And they were killing children.

The EMT jogged into the remainder of his drunk and onto the Golden Gate. He had fallen asleep just after one in the morning, after drinking since three that afternoon, and when he woke up a couple hours later, he possessed the miraculous and false impression that he had escaped a hangover, when in fact he was still drunk. He pulled a pinched bag of saline from the glassy pyramid of the pile in his empty fridge and tapped himself with an IV.

A run into dawn was what he needed. It had all the necessary romance of asceticism required to balance the Friday feeling which had possessed him at the end of his shift and sent him around the usual circuit of bars. The complete absence of remorse was the main sign he missed. It was conspicuously absent. It usually arrived prior to the resolve to atone, to burn the body for needing what it seemed to need every hour off the job.

May’s early summer put him out on the pre-dawn street shirtless, San Francisco’s air not a degree below sixty-five. His route was erratic, his pace fast. The eucalyptus in the Presidio clicked, its coyotes only rumors. Some distraction brushed him and he nearly rolled his ankle on the ragged edge of the road, but caught himself and felt no injury. By 4:15AM he powered up the footpath to the bridge’s fortress of persimmon bones, the clarity all the way to Berkeley a gift of the emptiness. An incurious fog held at the Farallons. Who could say if it faced the city or faced away?

The fact of the distant fog would later undermine his memory of the moment the girl emerged on the wrong side of the railing. Because in his memory, it was a moment of materialization, her face cascading out of nothing, coalesced from fog, her presence defying gravity. She was not hovering, though. That was one more ignored failure of perception undermining his myth of sobriety. She stood on the narrow platform on the unprotected side of the rail, the cellar of the Bay a four second free fall roaming blackly beneath her.

He stopped running. When he did, he could see the suspension cables again, incarcerating the city. His breath was loud, his head swaying. The sporadic cars clapping the joints transferred their arrhythmia to his chest. The dawn was not nearly as close as he’d hoped. The expanse of night deformed itself around his vision. He felt it was possible he would pass out. He should have seen her from a distance, but he didn’t. And of course without any fog she would have seen him running towards her from far away. Her line of sight would have been clear, and in the silences between the white rips of traffic she might have heard him running towards her, caught glimpse of him each time he moved in and out of the halogenic amber. Frozen there, watching him, she might have thought someone had come running to make sure she didn’t discard herself. And wasn’t he a regular saver of lives?

The EMT imagined himself this way before he blacked out.

The surveillance cameras did not black out.

Stitched together, from the dashcam on the 43 MUNI bus which swerved to miss the EMT running in the middle of the lane in the Presidio, to the traffic camera tracking his pale torso weaving and shadow boxing onto the bridge’s pedestrian pathway, surveillance cameras relayed a different testimony.

Later, he saw all of this footage, including his time with the girl his memory left on the wrong side of the rail. Especially this footage. On the job, he was most reliable at the moments of greatest need. But the opposite was true outside of the job. When he wasn’t pumping narcan into a junkie laid out in a public toilet, not staunching an artery in some Tenderloin SRO, not dancing the howling SFFD bus through the city’s hilly intersections, his partner reanimating a blue-faced baby expiring in the back, he was utterly fallible. In the peacetime of life he was the greatest risk, though in the past he had been a risk only to himself.

According to the footage of this moment on the bridge, he did not pass out. Standing there, weaving, he faced down the girl standing on the edge. He appeared to be talking to her, her talking to him in return. What he says goes unheard, what she says in return unheard as well. In the near monochromatic light, her hair gives off a glare, rising in an updraft. Her exact expression is muted by the camera’s resolution. There is only body language, and to his mind, his is not the body language appropriate to the scene. Not open, not gentle. Not delicately balanced, standing like a man on one side of a scale suspending a teenage girl above an asphalt black abyss.

No. What it looks like is security footage of a drunk at a bar, bothering a woman half his age. There is even a point where he leans at first an unsteady hand and then slides his whole upper body against the four-foot high guard rail, filing an appeal not for life itself, but against the half-life of his own night, a desperate, closing-time posture pitched against the prospect of going home alone.

Expert lip readers worked the frames one at a time, but the girl’s words, if they were ever divined, weren’t shared with the EMT. There is only the vacancy in his head, one more of the many defects in his brain’s lattice-work. Her last words weren’t the smeared cursive loops left under the windshield-wiper of her Volvo, abandoned on the Marin side of the bridge. They were spoken to him. Whether they were blessings or curses, the record remained incomplete. The look on his face as he received them is obscured by the angle, but imagines her watching them die against his face like birds against a tower’s glass facade. What a cosmic joke to have your guardian angel show up drunk. What a final affront and bitter confirmation.

He heard the fluorescent lights before he opened his eyes to receive them. He waited behind reddening lids, waited for the billowing of shame sure to follow the uncountable hours. He had and had never been here before, waking in a strange place. If he’d been picked up somewhere, he always prayed it had been by someone on the job who knew him, someone who had seen him at his best and so understood the possible causes behind finding him at his worst. Stillness was essential. If he disturbed one particle, the terrible chain reaction of bodily awareness would begin. Let it be the last time. It will be my last time. Please, before I open my eyes, let the universe bend around the softness of my bargaining.

The men who found him were chafing to open his eyes. No one he knew rousted him from the administrative holding cell. They brought in a laptop. A bead of sweat slipped from his scalp at the first viewing, bolting from his brain into a plume of cold intuition at what was to come, the weightless acceleration of why he was in the room with the bridge cops and coast guard guys. He braced for the warping recollection of lost time.

The girl looked away from him, slouched in his obliterated perception, leveled her gaze at the jeweled city, and stepped off the bridge. The way she disappeared, it looked like a glitch in the display. With the authorities gargoyling, he watched himself watching the space where she had been so radiant just a second before. His past ghost didn’t flinch or follow her down, just turned around and ambled out of the frame with shithoused arrogance, as if rejection was mutual, part of the game. Yeah, fine, don’t worry about me babe, there are other fish in the sea.

Pressure was brought to bear on his life, more than might have otherwise been expected. The girl’s father was a powerfully connected principle in a venture capital firm. He leaned on the EMT’s life in all the visible and invisible ways until the EMT was no longer an EMT. He wasn’t quite subject to the punitive legal definitions of indifference and recklessness.

The father had wanted to know what his daughter said and what the EMT had said in return. All he had to do to keep his job was tell the story his union rep provided him. He had tried to sweat out a bender, and when he came across the girl on the bridge he had tried to talk her into changing her mind. No one could contradict anything the EMT said. Anyone who saw the surveillance footage might doubt him, but in the end, not that many people would see it. Besides, the union rep said, you don’t know you didn’t try and talk her out of it. When the stakes are high, the rep said, even a coyote doesn’t mind the taste of his own leg.

He could see the rep was right. He didn’t know what he had said, but he knew what he didn’t say. Now it was time to stick to the policy of omission, even if the fabrication of honorable intent would give him a pass. But the girl had taken some part of him over the rail. He couldn’t explain how if he escaped this time he would only hobble into all of the traps waiting for him. So with his silence as the excuse, they took the motor out of his life, shut the doors on the back of the bus and drove away without lights or sirens. To thank him for what good he had managed on the job, they cut him loose with a shade tree’s worth of severance a strong recommendation he take them up on the counseling referral at the city’s expense.

With the father’s civil suit pending, he felt like a fugitive. When the presiding judge dismissed the suit, declining to award ruinous damages in light of the fact the ex-EMT had not brought the girl to the bridge, not put her over the rail, not pushed her, and though he could not remember what he said to her before she jumped, there was no evidence he had encouraged her, and no reasonable expectation he could have done anything to prevent the tragedy, he did so reluctantly and with an air of full sympathy for the father’s fury. Declining to award the damages was not absolution.